OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1d ago
When you find something via Google, do you immediately and unconditionally trust it?
Certainly not. When I research something I look at multiple different sources, make judgements about which ones I find the most trustworthy and credible, and synthesise a judgement.
If I ask an LLM about anything, I need to do the research that I would have done even if I had not asked the LLM. The LLM adds no value. It does not shorten the research process, nor improve what I find by showing me any hints about where to look.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I can't actually tell what you asked a bot to do. You asked a bot to 'create a feature'? What the heck is that? A feature of what? At first I assumed you meant a coding task of some kind, but then you described it as writing 'thousands of words of fiction', which sounds like something else entirely. I have no idea what you had a bot do that you thought was so impressive.
At any rate, I think I've explained myself adequately? To repeat myself:
But I think that written verbal acuity is, at best, a very restricted kind of 'intelligence'. In human beings we use it as a reasonable proxy for intelligence and make estimations based off it because, in most cases, written expression does correlate well with other measures of intelligence. But those correlations don't apply with machines, and it seems to me that a common mistake today is for people to just apply them. This is the error of the Turing test, isn't it? In humans, yes, expression seems to correlate with intelligence, at least in broad terms. But we made expression machines and because we are so used to expression meaning intelligence, personality, feeling, etc., we fantasise all those things into being, even when the only thing we have is an expression machine.
Yes, a bot can generate 'thousands of words of fiction'. But I already explained why I don't think that's equivalent to intelligence. Generating English sentences is not intelligence. It is one thing that you can do with intelligence, and in humans it correlates sufficiently well with other signs of intelligence that we often safely make assumptions based on it. But an LLM isn't a human, and its ability to generate sentences in no way implies any other ability that we commonly associate with intelligence, much less any general factor of intelligence.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I'm not sure how that helps, since any given LLM's output is based on traditional sources like Google or the open internet. It would be quicker and easier for me to just Google the thing directly. Why waste my time asking an LLM and then Googling the LLM's results to confirm?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Well, I wouldn't use intentionality for bots at all. I think intentionality presupposes consciousness, or that is to say, subjectivity or interiority. Bots have none of those things. I don't think it's possible to get from language manipulation to consciousness.
At any rate, I certainly agree that every ideological person believes untrue things about the world. I'm not sure about the qualification 'for instrumental reasons' - I suspect that's true if you define 'instrumental' broadly enough, but at that point it's becoming trivial. At any rate, if you leave off reasons, I am confident that every person full stop holds some false beliefs.
That doesn't seem like the same thing to me, though. Humans sometimes represent the world falsely to ourselves. That's not what bots do. Bots don't represent the world to themselves at all. We sometimes believe falsely; they don't believe at all. They are not the kinds of things capable of holding beliefs.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I think translating code is probably a sensible thing to use a bot for - though I'm not sure it's fundamentally different in kind to, say, Google Translate. I grant that the bots have impressive ability to general syntactically correct text, and I'm sure that applies to code as much as it does natural language. In fact I suspect it applies even more, since code is easier than natural language.
I am less sure about its value for looking up scientific information. It is really faster or more reliable than checking Wikipedia? I am not sure. I know that I, at least, make a habit of automatically ignoring or skipping past any AI-generated text in answer to a question, even on scientific matters, because I judge that the time I spend checking whether or not the bot is right is likely equal or greater than the amount of time I spend just looking it up for myself.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
You said it better than I could, and with more relevant expertise.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
My experience with AI bots has generally been that they are extremely articulate when it comes to producing correct English text, but they have no awareness or intentionality and therefore no sense of relationship to fact, and no sense of context or meaning. What they do very well is string together words in response to prompts, and despite heroic efforts to get their output to be more fact-sensitive, the fundamental issue has never really been overcome.
I call them nonsense because I think that sense requires some sort of relationship to both fact and context. To be sensible is to be aware of your surroundings. That's not the case with bots.
I would add, at least, that this:
Deepseek, however, with a bit of prompting can be completely insane yet rational and easily smarter than most people you see if you go to any place outside of a professional context.
seems to depend on definitions of rationality or intelligence that I don't think I share. I think bots are very efficient at producing English text, even quite complex text. It's trivial enough to show that a bot can produce a better written letter or better poem or what have you than the average man or woman on the street.
But I think that written verbal acuity is, at best, a very restricted kind of 'intelligence'. In human beings we use it as a reasonable proxy for intelligence and make estimations based off it because, in most cases, written expression does correlate well with other measures of intelligence. But those correlations don't apply with machines, and it seems to me that a common mistake today is for people to just apply them. This is the error of the Turing test, isn't it? In humans, yes, expression seems to correlate with intelligence, at least in broad terms. But we made expression machines and because we are so used to expression meaning intelligence, personality, feeling, etc., we fantasise all those things into being, even when the only thing we have is an expression machine.
Bots and LLMs can produce statements that look very polished, and which purport to describe the world. In many cases, those descriptions are even accurate. But they are still, it seems to me, generating nonsense.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I continue to be baffled that anybody takes these bots seriously, or sees Grok or xAI or their competitors as anything other than nonsense generators. A slight change to the flavour of the nonsense doesn't really change my opinion any. Perhaps it moves me in the direction of thinking that Musk is childish and temperamental, but I already thought that, so it doesn't make much difference.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I have at least heard the idea from Aboriginal people directly, though the way they framed it to me was in terms of having 'weak genes'. That said, I do not rate the scientific literacy of the person who told me that at all, so I have no idea if it's actually true, or just an excuse one might tell oneself on seeing one's pale skin.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
In this case the context is also that most senators dislike that oath and took it insincerely. If you look at the recording of Thorpe swearing the oath and making a fuss, the other senators in the room were rolling their eyes. One commented, "None of us like it", and a minister afterwards called the oath "archaic and ridiculous".
Australian parliamentarians are legally required to swear an oath to the Queen (as it was at the time; it's now the King) when they take office, but it is safe to say that very few of them actually believe the oath or take it remotely seriously. This is from 2016, but over half of them support a republic (yes, this is significantly out of step with popular opinion, politicians as a class are often unrepresentative), and I think it's fair to say that on a plain reading of the oath, bearing true allegiance to his majesty and his heirs and successors would be incompatible with wanting to abolish him.
But none of them take it seriously. We are not a nation that takes oaths seriously.
(I would not single out Australia in this respect - I think the West in general has largely given up on oaths. My favourite example of this, actually, is that becoming an American citizen requires a person to explicitly renounce any other citizenship or allegiance, and yet large numbers of people become American citizens while retaining prior citizenships. Nobody cares.)
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I think that generally holds true for older, more established churches, like Catholics and Anglicans. They tend to be asset-rich and cash-poor, all the more so because many of the most conspicuous assets have substantial maintenance costs. There's a reason why most cathedrals you visit have donation boxes for upkeep, because just having a cathedral is a major ongoing expense.
Younger or more 'low church' groups often don't have this issue. If your church is run out of a big concrete block, or even a warehouse or something, you can enjoy much lower operating costs. You may just rent the building and be quite mobile, or if you own it, it can much more easily be shared with others or rented out for an additional income stream. Traditional church buildings don't have that flexibility.
I note that Deverell's fourteen aspirations put a particular emphasis on property sales, which I take as reflecting the reality that the Anglicans are declining in numbers and are therefore regularly selling church buildings that are no longer used in sufficient numbers to justify their upkeep. The same is true of Uniting, though somewhat less so of Catholics (who have done better at buoying their numbers through migration). Probably there's opportunity there?
Property sales were, to my knowledge, required from the churches to fund compensation about the sexual abuse scandals - or at least, that's what the Anglicans and Uniting did. They just don't have the cash on hand.
Anyway, yes, in general the stereotype that the churches are rich is misleading. The churches often have a lot of valuable stuff, if only because they are very old and have accumulated property intergenerationally, but their actual budgets are much more shoestring than one would expect.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Tasmania is an interesting one because it's a case of an almost accidental genocide. The Palawa were quite few in number to begin with, and devastated by disease. They then also decided to set about attacking European settlers in raids, and, because colonial government was fairly weak, the settlers tended to band together and counter-raid them, and since the settlers had guns and the Palawa had sharpened sticks, the results were fairly predictable. By the time the colonial government got together enough to locate and resettle the survivors, there were only a few hundred left, and they didn't last.
Today the Palawa are a rare example of an ethnic group that exists purely as mixed-race. There are no people of pure Palawa descent left in existence - they are all people of mixed Palawa-European heritage, and almost all of them pass as white. Examples today would include Michael Mansell, whom I just mentioned, Marcus Windhager, Alison Overeem, Garry Deverell, and so on. All of them, at a glance, are obviously white or Anglo. However, it is supposed to be racist to question a person's Aboriginality, especially if their appearance makes them plainly white.
Deverell, actually, wrote a piece related to Yoorrook last year that hit many of the same notes as this year's report, albeit focused specifically on churches. The 14 aspirations he links are conspicuously unreasonable, including that every Anglican organisation in the state commit itself to employing Aboriginals as 5% or more of its workforce (bear in mind that Aboriginals are less than 1% the population of Victoria); that all properties granted to the church by the government be made freely available for Aboriginal use and that in the event of any such property being sold, Aboriginal groups with a traditional claim receive it for free; that 15% of the sale of any other church properties be given to Aboriginal people directly as reparations; and that all parishes pay 5% or more of their budgets to local Aboriginal groups. It is primarily a demand for money.
The Anglican response to this, of course, was "no".
OliveTapenade
5d ago
The short answer is no.
There are a small handful of tribal communities that are mostly continuous with pre-colonial groups, but they are very few, remote, and largely irrelevant to this conversation. The comparison that I usually make is with the Maori, who did have a significant level of political organisation prior to European contact, and when Europeans showed up, pretty quickly recognised the value of having organised representatives for negotiation. That is not the case for Aboriginals, who are not a single unified ethnicity and never had much political organisation beyond the level of the local tribal chief.
No, because there's no umbrella Aboriginal organisation that can police that. It's not like the Maori in New Zealand, who do have their own government-like organisation that can assess who is and who is not Maori.
In theory it's the three part test (descended from Aboriginals, identifies as Aboriginal, is recognised by the Aboriginal community), but as it's hard to apply in practice, most of the time it's just self-identification. This has led to absurdities like people with only tiny amounts of Aboriginal ancestry, who look and sound exactly the same as Anglo people, identifying as a proud Aboriginal man or woman.
I raise you Michael Mansell.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
For what it's worth, at least, Thorpe only got in because she was on a bizarre Greens senate ticket, and there is no way in hell she is getting re-elected.
I do think that after she refused to take the senatorial oath, and then, when pressed, said it in an obviously insincere way (and admitted that insincerity on the record afterwards), she should have disqualified herself from taking her seat. There is a valid procedural issue there - she is verifiably not in good faith.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.
Yes, I think this part is probably correct. There is no actual framework to negotiate from, and in effect Aboriginal demands rest entirely on what they're able to guilt the greater Australian society into giving them. If I were feeling suspicious I'd suspect that recent attempts to formalise the relationship with mainstream Australia are motivated in part by the realisation that larger and larger parts of that society are now made of migrants from Asia, and migrants from Asia do not feel guilt about Aboriginals at all.
To the rest of your post, I appreciate all the detail about Native American history, but I do think that on the broader level it's true that much of Australia's most toxic progressive activism is imported from the US. It's just not directly imported from Native American activism, which we are largely ignorant of and do not care about. (Though "the Americans have treaties with Natives" was absolutely a card that gets played over here when Treaty comes up.) However, we did have, for instance, a copycat BLM movement inspired by the American one, which focus on indigenous deaths in custody.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.
My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.
It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.
I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Eh, I think it's contextual? The terrain is different depending on each nation. You don't find exactly this sort of thing in the UK because the UK isn't a colony.
However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.
Yoorrook is part of the activist industry, and it's supported by the government because the government and the public service are deeply in bed with Group-like NGOs. That's a bad thing, but I'm not sure it tells us that much about l'Australie profonde, so to speak - and if the existence of that whole complex is the problem, well, half of that is imported from the United States anyway. We're downstream of American culture wars and tend to absorb their worst elements, albeit a few years too late.
So I certainly wouldn't advise the Americans to be too smug.
As for the British... honestly, I think they have their own issues to deal with. They aren't colonial in nature, but national pride and identity in the UK are complicated enough as to need their own post.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!
You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.
'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.
Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.
This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.
Here is the summary of their report.
You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'
This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.
Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.
If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Some people think being patriotic is some kind of duty, but I'm not one of those people. Your truest and highest duty as a citizen is to make a thoughtful vote at every given election opportunity.
This is something I'm inclined to disagree with. No comment on patriotism, which I think is a snarl word that admits of too many different meanings to be useful, but I think what you've done here is an instance of fetishism. Voting is one thing that dutiful citizens often do. It is not identical to dutiful citizenship. I think you're mistaking one expression of a duty with the duty itself.
As I would have it, responsible democratic citizenship does require participating in the political life of the community. That often involves voting, but voting itself is not sufficient for it. A responsible citizen may choose not to vote in certain circumstances (as act of protest, for instance); and an irresponsible citizen may exist even while regularly voting. I don't deny that there's a correlation - responsible and thoughtful citizens vote more often, the irresponsible and incompetent vote less - but the correlation shouldn't be seen as absolute. Moreover, there are many ways for a citizen to participate in the life of their community and support their fellows that do not involve voting, and I value a lot of those ways above voting itself.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Reminds me of Umberto Eco's Cult of the Imperfect. He applies the idea even to acknowledged masterpieces - one of the reasons why Hamlet, for instance, has been so compelling is because it is in some ways badly written. Lakes of ink have been spilled on trying to interpret Hamlet's motives because they are not clear in the play - because they are actually rather arbitrary and inconsistent, in a way that would probably strike us as bad writing, if Shakespeare did not have the reputation that he does. And while you could just conclude it's because Shakespeare was rushed or made some bad calls, it's so much more interesting to treat the text as whole, the arbitrariness as intentional, and dive into psychoanalysing the hero.
Star Wars is also in that golden zone of imperfection, I think. Even in the OT, the films are frequently disjointed, and characterisation changes wildly without explanation. It's pretty obvious that ANH is written for a universe in which Luke's father and Darth Vader were different people, and Luke and Leia are not related, for instance. In ESB, Luke hates and fears Vader and wants to kill him, and Vader disloyally seeks an ally to stage a coup against the Emperor; in RotJ, without any explanation, Luke now regards Vader with this self-sacrificial love, and Vader is so broken upon the Emperor's will as to consider revolt impossible. It's not inconceivable that something happened in between the films to cause both of them to change their minds (maybe Luke struggled long and hard with the revelation that Vader was his father and eventually came to the painful conclusion that he must love him the same way he thought he loved Anakin; maybe the Emperor discovered Vader's plot and tortured him into submission), but there is no hint of either of these processes in RotJ. The characters are just... different.
And yet I can't make himself dislike Star Wars because of this, or view the OT as lesser. I even like the PT. I still love those films, all six of them. (There are only six Star Wars films.) In many ways I love Star Wars because of its flaws, not only because of its strengths.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I speculate that people who want to talk all day about haplotypes are too, well, boring to draw that much controversy. If you're very interested in the science of genetics there might be a good conversation there, but most people are not. Moreover, people who want to talk about that will probably learn that the Motte isn't a great place for deep dives into genetic science. That sort of conversation requires a lot of specialised knowledge that most Motters don't have.
By contrast, people who enjoy making edgy generalisations about this or that racial group seem like they're optimising more for drama and controversy, and this is a better place to get that. It's the culture war angle. Diving into the arcane complexities of genetic science is interesting, but it's not incendiary. It doesn't pick fights the way that its edgier cousin does.
Naturally get more of the latter type.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
This is pretty much my take on 'HBD' or what I might term the 'neo-racialists'. It is no doubt true that there's genetic variation, on the population level, across the human race, and these variations to some extent correlate with racial categories. I can't really argue with that. However, the HBDers routinely outrun that observation and draw massive, sweeping conclusions about the desirability of using race as a proxy for a huge number of other issues, and therefore organising society, or even treating individuals, on the basis of race. The whole thing is just a motte and bailey.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
But the problem with basing a theory on a hypothetical is that it feels like wishing, the infamous 'my ideology will be the one to arise from the ashes'. Trying to predict the world after an epoch-changing event is like trying to look inside or beyond a singularity.
Well, I think it's reasonable to take a position like, "the current order cannot or will not hold, massive changes are likely to come, therefore I/we should try to be resilient for now while being flexible to changing possibilities". If the political order is likely to radically change, in ways you cannot predict but which change the space of what's possible, then it makes sense to avoid investing too much in the current order while remaining open to the winds of change.
That said, oops, I had assumed you were American. Presumably you would need to adapt your specific concerns to your particular country.
Thank you for the serious answer, though. I appreciate it.
I don't buy your appeal to normal people here. I think that most normal people do not think that chatbots are intelligent.
Realistically, I don't think most people can explain why they're not intelligent, because most people don't have definitions of intelligence on-hand. I think for most people it's an I-know-it-when-I-see-it situation. That's why we need to philosophise a bit about it in order to produce more reasonable definitions and criteria for intelligence.
Anyway, I think that intuitions of most normal people would say that bots aren't intelligent, and if we explored that with them, and had a patient, philosophically nuanced conversation about why, we probably would find that most people intuitively think that intelligence involves things like, to quote myself, 'awareness or intentionality'.
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